Water’s hard to come by in Grahamstown during the city’s frequent water outages. So confronted with large tracts of burning grassland, fire fighters often use a technique called back-burning to stop a fire.
Water’s hard to come by in Grahamstown during the city’s frequent water outages. So confronted with large tracts of burning grassland, fire fighters often use a technique called back-burning to stop a fire.
But during the recent Grahamstown fires this recognised method went wrong and instead of stopping the fire, ended up spreading it further.
Makana Municipality's Assistant Director of Parks and Recreation, Kevin Bates, said Bates said when back burning is done correctly, it is highly effective in putting out fires.
However, a sudden change in wind direction during back-burning to halt last weekend’s fires had spread the fire in different directions.
What is back-burning?
According to Wikipedia back burning, or back firing, is a way of reducing the amount of flammable material during a wildfire. This is done by starting small fires along a man-made or natural fire break in front of a main fire. It is done to stop a wildfire that is already in progress. It is called back burning because the small fires are designed to 'burn back towards the main fire front'.
The reason for back burning is to leave little material to feed the main fire when it reached that area.
Back-burning is usually done along a natural firebreak such a river, road or a bulldozed clearing.
